Private Categories and Sections
With private categories, you can control user access to specific areas in your community. For example, you can create a private area that is only accessible to employees or specific clients. This article describes how to configure and grant access to private categories.
Configure Private Categories
To set a category to private, go to Admin > Categories. Select the category and expand the Access section. Select Specific members and click Save.
Configure Private Sections
Sections work a little differently than categories. A section takes on the settings of the categories within the section. When every category in the section is set to private, the Section becomes private automatically.
Grant User Access to Private Categories
There are several ways to grant user access to a private category.
1. Add a List of Users to a Category
From Category Settings > Users, click Add and paste a list of user email addresses.
2. Add a Single User to a Category
Locate the user in Admin > Users, expand the Category Access section, click Add and select the categories to assign:
3. Use Groups to Simplify Access Management
If you are managing access for a large number of users and categories, using groups simplifies this process. With groups you can assign access to multiple categories by email domain or by uploading a list of users. For more information see: Using Groups to Manage Category Access
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Forumbee Support is there a way to invite users to a private category via a link instead of inviting through forumbee? I'd like to share a link w/ our users instead of adding their email addresses in forumbee.
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Hi Erie , it is possible to grant user access to private categories without sending them an invite email from Forumbee.
First, you need to configure user access:
- If they are not already in your user list, they need to be added as users by going to Add Users and entering their email addresses. If you don't want the email invitation to go out, just don't check the box to send the email invitation.
- After they are added as users, expand the user details and check the private categories to which you would like to grant access.
How users will access the private category link:
- After you have shared the private category link with them, users will be prompted to log in to see it. If they haven't signed up already, they will need to click the 'Sign Up' link and sign up using the same email address as the one you used to grant access.
Let me know if that helps? Thank you!
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Forumbee Support Thank you. So it is not possible for me to invite people using only a link? It requires their email address so they are added as users/given access to the category? We're running into an issue where we don't have the end users information and there are too many of them to manually add to forumbee. We want to provide a link to their regional managers who will be sending the link out to whoever needs access.
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Erie B Unfortunately, it isn't possible to invite people to a private community or a private category using only a link.
If you are looking to give access to private categories, one option might be to use the 'Access code' setting for the category:
You can give out a link to the category with the access code, and users with the code can enter the category. They only need to enter the code once, and from then on it remembers it for them.
Keep in mind that with this setting, all users in the community will see the category name in the list with a padlock icon next to it. If they click the category name, they'll see the access code prompt.
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